Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.

I didn't hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.

Each others' lives are our best textbooks.

Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. p.189

I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn't criticize.

Always ask the turtle.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it's violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.

Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women." 

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.

no one ever got radicalized by being grateful

I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.

The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.

It's said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.

Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

After all, hope is a form of planning.